Haldeman was an engineer in the Army. He was in Belgium, France, and Germany and was wounded in France.

I was going to go into business. I started building a bowling alley, and then World War II started. I was a single man, and single men just didn’t stand a chance of getting a deferment. The Japanese bombed us on December 7th, and on the 14th of January I went into service. I became an Army officer and spent six years in the military, and a good three and a half were spent in Europe. We landed in England, and there was no war for us; we were just in training, and it was boring to get trained day after day after day. You didn’t know what you were training for, really. Some of our units would be shipped down into the Mediterranean area and they would be in combat zones. Others were shipped into Scotland and the islands, and I was one of the guys that sat on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. Finally we got orders to move over to the eastern shore, and of course we all had guesses of what was going to happen, but we didn’t know why we were being transferred.

What did you do after that?

They loaded us aboard ships and I was commanding a company then, two hundred soldiers, and there were five officers counting myself. We were a forestry unit, the 74th Engineer Forestry Unit. We trained to cut forestry logs into planks and use them for building bridges and so forth. They would go to Army units and it was welcome for the boredom of just setting and training and training. I went in on D + 6 l. The entire unit was on one boat, and we were transported to the French shore and we had to go off from a net on to the boats, and some of us rode in a boat to get onto land and a few had to swim in. They missed the boat, but we didn’t lose any men going in to shore, and we were happy to get the 205 of us on French soil. We didn’t really accomplish very much until we got to the Luxembourg, German border.

That was where we got into the combat and the bullets making life miserable for us, but we didn’t have anything very active until December, and by that time we were living in tents and we fixed our tents so they were comfortable and all of a sudden the Germans wanted them. Fortunately they were not demanding in our area, and they were more interested in making us think that they wanted to get in there, but they went five or six miles north of us and I was very glad that they did because the shooting was very much more pronounced in that area than mine. When they came through we lost one man to a bullet wound, and there was seven or eight that were hospitalized, but all were back on duty within a week or so and we came out very nicely on that.

But then we were pulled from the combat area and had a couple of months before we had to prepare for going back into Germany itself, and that was quite a training program there, but when we did go in we were glad we had the training because our losses were minimal. We built a bridge across the Rhine River and didn’t lose a man during the building. The Germans were within four miles of us, but we had a hill between us and we had infantry unit up on the hill and they prevented the Germans from zeroing in on us. We got our bridge in with a minimum of trouble, and they pulled us out of there and we went south where the American army was just attempting to get into the area, and we helped put a bridge across the Rhine and Main Rivers. The Rhine River is a big main river that flowed from Switzerland to Germany to the ocean near the northern part of Germany and it was very prosperous area for the Germans who lived and farmed there. That was a very productive area, and we took over that. That was one way of starving the enemy.

Did you have brothers and sisters in the war?

No, I was an only child. My father was a farmer and I grew up on the farm southeast of LaCrosse, and our home base was Norwalk and Cashton. Both towns had 600 people. Our high schools were there and I was in a high school class of 12. We had two teachers and that is all we had. We had another teacher who was half high school and half grade school, and she would have a couple of classes of algebra in the morning and the rest of the day she had eighth grade. That is how they operated in those days.

I got there just as transportation became more prominent. We all had autos at that time, but the autos aren’t like they are today and the roads were not the same. The roads were gravel and dirt, and in the spring the road would be broken up and many times you had to take a horse to school. It is laughable now to think about it. Looking back, it was a pleasant life that we lived. The Depression hit in my family and it began to hurt while I was a sophomore in high school, but my father didn’t admit it was a depression until I was a senior and then he knew that it was serious. When I went to college he was able to help me with tuition and little monetary help now and then, but it wasn’t much and I had to get a job.

I worked in the Pontiac garage where people were storing their automobiles during the winter. They began having thievery because they had given keys to the people storing their cars, and the insurance companies were adamant that there had to be a night watchman because too many things were being stolen. They hired me for night watchman, and they gave me a little cubbyhole on the second floor of the garage. There was a button to open and close the door, and I could peek out the window at the people. I spent a couple of years there, and surprisingly it was very profitable for me. They paid me $8 a week and two meals a day, which he bought at a restaurant that was in the same building as the garage. The owner of the garage also owned the restaurant. I was grateful for the meals, and since I was there every day I got to know the people very well, and they felt sorry for me and they were very cooperative. Usually I left with a noon lunch and I wasn’t stealing it, they were just cooperating with me.

What kinds of New Deal programs did we have in Wisconsin?

My father had been quite active in politics in Wisconsin when the Lafollette’s were very powerful. The founder of the family was Bob Lafollette and he was governor in the teens, and he was elected to the United States Senate and he died in the Senate in the early 20s, and his son took over and his name was Bob Lafollette too. He had a brother named Phil, and Phil got elected to the governorship in the early 30s. During those years there were a tremendous number of people, who were without jobs, and Phil did a lot of road building and highway construction and putting people to work out there, and some of the work was done by hand when it could have been done with machines, but the people needed employment.

We fought our way through, and the war came along and saved the day. When the war came, I was out of school for a while and I was with the state highway department. I decided that I was going into business for myself and I went into a sawmill business and logging and I had a crew of men cutting trees and a group of men running a sawmill, and everything was going smooth and I was making money, so along came World War II. I had just financed a bowling alley in Augusta, Wisconsin. I had just gotten the bowling alley in payment for a bad debt. A man owed me money and he had this bowling alley, and I had the mortgage and he had too much debt and he lost the place. I got the bowling alley and I went to Milwaukee to get some new balls for it, and I was going to clean the place up and take over and I was going to have a grand opening.

I was on my way to Milwaukee and I was driving a 1941 Hudson. During the war the Hudson Company passed out of the scene. They didn’t last long. I had this blue Hudson and I was going down to Milwaukee for a load of balls for the bowling alley, and I had a radio in the car. In those days, radios in cars were very unusual and I had to change it every twenty or thirty miles, because the radio stations didn’t broadcast far enough. I would go so far and I would have to change the station and find one that was closer to me. So here they were talking about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I knew what was going to happen to me. The next Monday, the war was starting and I came back to Sparta, Wisconsin, where my draft board was, and several guys had been in to be interviewed for extensions of their draft privileges. “The way they were being turned down I knew that it would be useless, so when it was my turn the chairman of the draft board asked me what I had to say and I told him I wanted to get into it as soon as I could, but I wanted to sell my business before I went. The chairman told me I was the first sensible man they had talked to that night.” He said that I could have some time, and I told them that I would get the business sold as quickly as possible. I went into the military on the 14th of January, and I spent six years to the day until I got out. I got to be a captain, and to get rid of me they made me a major.

After the war ended Glenn worked for the City Services and Wausau Concrete for 21 years.